Dive your ship into space and escape the light.

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It's occurred to me that it would be nice to have a coach or to get someone to review my tracks on a regular basis to get more targetted feedback, especially in the area of sound design and sound timbres. Anyone interested in helping out a struggling musician?

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Sun, Feb 26, 10:15 - 12:45.

Intro

A E C G

i V II vii

Verse A

i III vii VI VI III iv V

// Prechorus

// III iv vii I III VI V I

Chorus

A C Dm Em G F E G

I'm struggling on what this song "is". Maybe like a spacefaring song, but I'm not sure what the next progression should be after the verse and where the modulation should go. I had a moment of wanting to give up but I pushed through it to lay out another set of chords. (I think it would be easier if I planned this out in advance.)

16:30 - 18:25. Finish the composition and try to tie it together. Needs more production practice (especially if I had time to audition it on other speakers and headphones). I think the levels are off - I really mixed it with low levels and as a result I don't think I used all of my dynamic range.

Total time: 5h 25m

== Objectives ==

Over the past month or two I've reviewed:

* Varying bass notes in a chord progression

* Using suspended chords

* Using seventh chords

* Using dominant secondary chords

* (Ongoing) Learning voice leading/counterpoint

A few other points that have been suggested by listeners (thanks!) include:

* Using more pads to fill out a song

* Improving transitions

* More "driving" bassline

Since last week I didn't end up creating a song I might concentrate on doing that first instead of doing more counterpoint and voice leading.

One thing I should also consider overall is better timbre and sound design for my music.

Gravity Well

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Into the wormhole. Hold on tight.

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I had some nice sounds that reminded me of space. I have also been watching a lot of Star Trek from the 90s. A few things though that I didn't spend enough time on was getting the melody sound right (too much echoing bleeding into the call-response tracks) and trying to fix a few conflicting sections where there's too much going on and muddiness. Maybe I can work on this next week.

The track is mostly hardware but has a lot of software effects.

Leads are from Nord Rack 2x, pads Alesis A6 Andromeda, the arp from Oberheim Xpander. Drums are MASCHINE, the ominous pad is Massive, the noises are from Stutter Edit. Lots of other SFX and mixing in software.

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Technique log:

Sun, Jan 29. 15:05 - 18:05. What's the composition technique this week? More secondary dominant chords and varying basslines.

I thought the song last week had some interesting tonal qualities to it, but it took a long time to create so I'd like to practice my speed this week.

Verse:

Em Bm C D

Em Gm Dm Am Em Gm Bm B/D (tension section)

Bassline melodics:

Em Dm Am B

The secondary dominant chords are in the counter section, though the whole track overall is pretty simple.

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Total time: 3h